tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post1196778821719205090..comments2015-08-02T09:41:28.336-04:00Comments on The Mumpsimus: No Comfort HereMatthew Cheneyhttps://plus.google.com/109233497006166204043noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-6191994716051073812007-04-10T20:37:00.000-04:002007-04-10T20:37:00.000-04:00Here's another voice to add to those praising Poss...Here's another voice to add to those praising <I>Possession</I>; it's the ultimate English major novel (if you studied English the way I did, going through the history of English lit). Gardner's a touchstone for me as well (though <I>On Moral Fiction</I> somewhat overstates things), and he helped me understand what troubled me so much--at the soul level as well as the writing level--when I read Ellison many years ago.<BR/><BR/>Chris, I know you asked "Old Fart," but I'd like to throw you some short fiction suggestions: Margo Lanagan's <I>Black Juice</I>, which achieves empathy by, oddly, stripping stories of their context--it's as if you're meeting characters on a more fundamental level; and Tim Gautreaux, author of <I>Same Place, Same Things</I> and <I>Welding with Children</I>. Gautreaux places us in Louisiana, roots his stories firmly in time and place, and gives us characters who function in a world in which morality is a visible dimension. The tales are "comforting" in that, to me, they provide both a controlled authorial glimpse into the lives of others and I feel I live in the same universe as the author.<BR/><BR/>Students of mine (eighth graders) often complain the literature is depressing. I get after them about using that term; they usually back off and just say an ending is sad or that, failing that, it's not "happy." Thus even an ambivalent ending is something of a let-down. Drawing from Gardner, I try to get them to see that merely by the act of writing something, an author has engaged the virtues of hope and faith, believing someone will connect with what's written and that, somehow, it matters. Here's where a focus on the way the story is told rather than the story itself, with its accompanying troubled emotions, is helpful: observe the mastery, admire the skill, get a kick out of this sentence, enjoy the way the whole thing is put together. This worked rather well with <I>Lord of the Flies</I>, I have to say.<BR/><BR/>ladislaw.livejournal.com<BR/>wpreston@mph.netBillPhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06411484951067468158noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-30963592284266680672007-04-08T02:42:00.000-04:002007-04-08T02:42:00.000-04:00I agree with Chris's distinction between sentiment...I agree with Chris's distinction between sentimentality as a mode and comfort as an end, but I think more often than than not sentimentality is the means by which authors arrive at comfort fiction - in the derogatory sense that we've been using.<BR/><BR/>Oh, and Matt, you should definitely read <I>Possession</I>. It's one of my all-time favorite novels.Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-44227335455887896182007-04-07T23:06:00.000-04:002007-04-07T23:06:00.000-04:00Cool ideas, Old Fart. I'd love to know what's on ...Cool ideas, Old Fart. I'd love to know what's on your list of great short fiction you've read lately, whether it's genre fiction or not. Would you share? I'm always looking for more good reads, and interested in knowing what other people consider great reads.Christopher Barzakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05317256912942472481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-48357853221505417202007-04-07T22:27:00.000-04:002007-04-07T22:27:00.000-04:00Honestly, what I would like more than anything rig...Honestly, what I would like more than anything right now is for writers to show me they are adults and not children. So many of the stories I've been reading recently seem like they were written by self-absorbed, non-thinking people who may or may not be adults. The solutions are simple. The set-ups are simple. The whole thing reads like somebody who never moved past the age of 18. I was reading some old New Worlds and Interzones and the difference in tone was remarkable (for the most part). Here were stories that succeeded or failed on adult terms. No comfortable solutions. No comfortable, pat endings. I mean, I've also read a lot of great short fiction lately. But almost none of it has been in publications designated as "genre". And don't get me started on "young adult". I think we're selling our souls right now to appeal to 18 year-olds when we should be thinking about what it means to be an adult reading and writing adult stories.<BR/><BR/>An Old FartAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-30160922908092821722007-04-07T18:50:00.000-04:002007-04-07T18:50:00.000-04:00Oh you should definitely read Possession. It's fa...Oh you should definitely read Possession. It's fantastic. Really. One of my absolute favorite novels.<BR/><BR/>Lyrical only when I take the time to actually edit my typos and grammatical confusions. But yes, total mutual-admiration society here.Christopher Barzakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05317256912942472481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-7462062779545958382007-04-07T16:14:00.000-04:002007-04-07T16:14:00.000-04:00Chris and I have been talking about this stuff tog...Chris and I have been talking about this stuff together for at least a year now, so I may be unconsciously using some shorthand here. (And he may find my posts articulate, but I think he writes far more lyrically than I. So we're a mutual-admiration society, too!)<BR/><BR/>Anyway, the word I've often come back to as we've talked is <B>empathy</B>, because I seem to be developing, whether I like it or not, an idealistic desire for at least some fiction to strive to create openings for empathy. I have a rather dialectic relationship with this idea at the moment, because part of me thinks 1.) it's too touchy-feely [I'm a congenital stoic most of the time] and 2.) it's impossible. But the sorts of books and stories I have most clung to are ones that use exactly the sort of honest emotional development that Abigail cites -- and I love Norman Rush; haven't read <I>Possession</I> yet -- to allow the reader to practice empathy. What I haven't figured out is a good vocabulary for discussing this sort of effect, or figuring out if it's a side-effect of other things, or if it can be located at the level of language, or... For me, it's a challenge of trying to find a better way to talk about the distinctions I find between fiction that I adore, fiction I respect, fiction I am indifferent to, and fiction I actively dislike. A personal quest, I suppose, but if I'm going to spout my opinions off in public, I feel like I should be able to talk about these distinctions more complexly. I don't know quite where I'll get to with it all, but I think the effort might lead to occasionally interesting things.Matthew Cheneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07704529564308222004noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-64137685381166303582007-04-07T11:45:00.000-04:002007-04-07T11:45:00.000-04:00I do think comfort or consolatory art is different...I do think comfort or consolatory art is different from sentimentality. Sentimentality can be in the writing itself, at the sentence level itself, in word choice. Consolation is more of a worldview or aim perhaps manifested in some forms of art. I believe the anti-comfort fiction critics of recent years attacked specifically the old notion of fantasy primarily being able to console its readers through the eucatastrophe--the moment of being delivered from evil or death. What I was also originally thinking when I began my post to think about all this, was how I thin it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. No particular work of fantasy, nor Fantasy literature itself, doesn't have to commit itself to consoling or disturbing. I think there's room for both of these in the same story/novel/piece/what have you. And I think that the foundation of critics of consolatory fiction rested largely on debasing it in order to prop up their own view that disturbance should be the primary aim of fantasy literature. I'm not sure fantasy literature should have a primary aim at all. Maybe individual stories and novel will have primary aims that their authors intended, but an entire genre or form of writing committing itself to one particular sort of aim would be very limiting, I think. Much how first wave surrealism was limited by its originators and practioners at first.Christopher Barzakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05317256912942472481noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-1470052957519720712007-04-07T06:30:00.000-04:002007-04-07T06:30:00.000-04:00I think there's something to be said for the idea ...I think there's something to be said for the idea that the old polemical structure of "I'm showing people how shit life really is..." is a tired literary conceit, as much in books as in films.<BR/><BR/>Isn't that all this issue is?<BR/><BR/>That setting a book on a council estate in Glasgow and having everyone be hooked on smack in order to make some point about life or the world is just as intellectually vacant as something like Little House on the Prairie or You've Got Mail with their cookie-cutter sentimentality and optimism.Jonathanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12664070458542872255noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-11971324922383131732007-04-07T06:22:00.000-04:002007-04-07T06:22:00.000-04:00I tend to think about this issue less in terms of ...I tend to think about this issue less in terms of comfort or discomfort and more in terms of sentimentality, by which I mean prioritizing emotion over the characters experiencing it. You get this attitude a lot in romantic comedies - it doesn't matter who the lovers are so long as they end the movie in a clinch - or in something like <I>The Time Traveler's Wife</I>, in which the characters are literally sublimated to the romance in which they're entangled.<BR/><BR/>If you look at a novel like <I>Possession</I>, in contrast, or the novels of Norman Rush, whose happy endings might be said to be just as saccharine, just as comforting as that of TTTW, there is no sense of sentimentality. The characters come first. We love them first and are only then made to wish for a happy ending for them. <BR/><BR/>It's the same with discomforting fiction. If we care about the characters, their misfortune will trouble us. If the point of the story is to trouble us, we won't care.Abigail Nussbaumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08562462228380637583noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5698059.post-64721185534571436762007-04-07T02:45:00.000-04:002007-04-07T02:45:00.000-04:00"the only justification for adding to those pages ..."the only justification for adding to those pages that I can think of is to add something that strives for an honesty and clarity of language and structure, something that is neither comforting nor discomforting by design, but is, instead, a tool for thinking and feeling more powerfully about the fact that we are alive in a world more complex than any of our philosophies."<BR/><BR/>This is actually what I wanted to get at, but I don't spend as much time as you do writing such articulate posts. :) I'm more of a thought bubble snap-shot blogger. Thanks for elaborating.Christopher Barzakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05317256912942472481noreply@blogger.com